Letters find young voters ambivalent, unenthusiastic

Four years ago, voters younger than 30 shaped history. They went to the polls in droves and helped make then-Sen. Barack Obama the nation's first black president-elect.

Your performance with young voters, Mr. President, was stunning: You crushed your Republican opponent by 35 percentage points. But in hindsight, you should have banked some of that mojo for this time around.

You still have a healthy lead among young voters, but it's smaller — about 19 percentage points, according to a recent Harvard survey — and squishier.

In 2008, 63 percent of the youngest voters — those 18 to 24 — said they would definitely vote. Today, it's just 48 percent.

"Yes, we can!" has given way to, "Eh, we might."

Don't take my word for it.

Listen to Heather Startup, a University of Central Florida grad who supported you in 2008 and is likely to do so again. But she said this time around, the election hasn't generated the same buzz.

"I work on two campuses, and I haven't heard that much about it," she said. "There's a lot of apathy in that age group."

Startup is 27 and lives with her husband in Lake Mary. She works two part-time jobs, teaching at Adventist University of Health Sciences and transcribing lectures for deaf students at UCF.

It keeps her pretty busy, but she's paid enough attention to your campaigns to talk comfortably about both.

The economy tops Startup's list of concerns, but she wants to hear more about higher education. She worries about rising student debt and declining state support for public universities. She fears too many elected officials now view higher education as simply "job training."

That approach she said, produces voters "who are trained but not educated."

Startup grew up in a conservative GOP family, but when it was time to register, she didn't join a party. She's voted for Republicans in the past but feels more comfortable with Democrats on most social issues.

Gov. Romney, Startup gives you credit for business success, but she worries you're a political chameleon. The Mitt Romney who won the GOP primary, she said, isn't the same candidate she's seen in the past couple of months.

"He's taken on different positions, even different personalities," Startup said. "I don't know which one is the reality."

Startup thinks you've tried hard, President Obama, and "done no worse than anyone else" faced with a similar financial disaster. Still, she's "not terribly confident" in your ability to repair the economic damage.

She concedes that Republicans have blocked most of your initiatives — and believes you've been "unfairly branded as an extremist" — but she ultimately thinks it's your responsibility to find a way forward.

"He needs to really articulate a vision that people can buy into," she said. "We need someone who can get things done."

You'll get her vote but not a ringing endorsement.

"The last four years haven't been great," she said. "But they haven't been an unmitigated disaster either."

He's a libertarian and Ron Paul fan who's supporting you, Gov. Romney, because he thinks you're more likely than President Obama to shrink government.

Walker is 21, and this will be his first time voting in a presidential election. He grew up outside Chicago — the son of a police commander — in an area he describes as "very conservative." He's grown into a devout capitalist who fears the GOP is driving voters like him away with "backward social policies."

"I am very pro-business and believe in free markets, competition and less regulation," he said. "However, I also believe in individual liberty and that government shouldn't be in someone's personal business."

Walker, a finance major, works as a pizza-delivery driver and is paying most of his own way through UCF, he said. To him, that's the way it should be. He'd like to see the government pull back on college aid, requiring students to work to cover college costs.

He agrees with you on many social issues, Mr. President, but he's convinced you would expand the reach of government and feed a sense of dependency he sees in some of his peers. That dynamic was on display, he said, during last year's Occupy protests.

"They were trying to influence people to oppose success," he said. "That's wrong on every level."

Walker is unmoved by economists who say your administration's stimulus plan helped stop the economy's bleeding. He thinks it did more harm than good by increasing the nation's debt load.

The economy, Walker maintains, would improve quickly if government slashed spending and regulations controlling businesses. Companies will not hire or expand, he said, if they're anxious about what the next president may do.

In Walker's scenario, President Obama, you're the source of that anxiety. So he's going to vote for Gov. Romney, even there's not much joy in that choice.